A low-cost flexible electrochemical accelerometer using graphene-integrated microchannel

Abstract

This paper reports a novel electrochemical accelerometer for applications of wearable systems and smart skins. An original flexible accelerometer based on graphene electrodes and a PDMS microchannel on polyimide flexible print circuit (FPC) has been achieved by low-cost fabrication process. Instead of expensive platinum electrodes, a graphene layer was transferred to FPC to function as chemical inertness sensitive electrodes. To simplify process steps and reduce fabrication cost, the microchannel on FPC was obtained without lithography process by using screen printing PDMS lines. In shock exciter experiment, the accelerometer was tested under 20g shock acceleration, providing 39.5mv/g (0.40μA/g) sensitivity. This microchannel electrochemical device can not only be used for acceleration sensing, but also provide more possibilities in flexible multi-sensor system, for example pressure, temperature and tactile sensing applications.